How "Big Ideas" Are Actually Hurting International Development 92
schnell writes: The New Republic is running a fascinating article that analyzes the changing state of foreign development. Tech entrepreneurs and celebrities are increasingly realizing the inefficiencies of the old charitable NGO-based model of foreign aid, and shifting their support to "disruptive" new ideas that have been demonstrated in small experiments to deliver disproportionately beneficial results. But multiple studies now show that "game changing" ideas that prove revolutionary in limited studies fail to prove effective at scale, and are limited by a simple and disappointing fact: no matter how revolutionary your idea is, whether it works or not is wholly dependent on 1.) the local culture and circumstances, and 2.) who is implementing the program.
Why giving ? (Score:2)
I do not understand why the need to give foreign aid in the first place, I really don't
I am from China, and when I was in China, China was hit by the double whammy from Chairman Mao - in the form of great famine and cultural upheaval
Tens of millions of people perished
Despite of the suffering, China didn't receive any fucking foreign aid from nobody --- and at the end of it, China still survive, and the population of China is still over one Billion
Why then the West wants to give out money to help those "poor
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Hey, you people decided you'd rather have Chairman Mao than the kleptocrats you had before. On balance, I'm not sure you made the right choice, but on the other hand, I'm not sure you didn't (the previous "government" was about as bad as any in history, when you come right down to it).
From what I've read, closer to 100 million
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Kind of hard to find a job in the middle of the great recession combined with massive outsourcing and legal/illegal rampant immigration.
Baloney. Go early in the morning to any Home Depot or other home improvement store, and you will see a crowd of day laborers in the parking lot. By late morning, most of them have found work for the day. Do a quick demographic survey, and this is what you will find: Number of white people: 0%. Number of black people: 0%. Number of Hispanic people: 100%. The reason is that the Hispanics can't get paid to do nothing. The problem is not a "lack of jobs" but a lack of easy jobs that people are willing to
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China has the right idea. If you don't work, you don't eat.
I imagine that would do wonders to clean up my city's streets from the hundreds of young people who prefer to camp there 24/7 versus getting a job.
Where I live and work (as a CSR consultant), Indonesia, people also don't eat if they don't get a job. Among other failings, malnutrition of children under 5 years runs at around 35%. That causes stunting and is associated with poor cognitive test scores, which is in turn correlated with lower income. I don't have the data for China handy, but your solution is overly simplistic and reflects poorly on your understanding of the article and the issue.
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It's called White Guilt. Google it.
Also, a corollary according to Jerry Pournelle: "Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide."
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When China gives foreign aid they're practicing Colonialism Lite, and in the long term that's a good thing. Remember the boost India got from British law, civil organization, and railroad engineering?
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Remember the boost India got from British law, civil organization, and railroad engineering?
When the British arrived in India in the 1600s, Indians and Britons had roughly similar levels of income. By 1947, when the British left, Indians had less than 5% the income of Britons, and India was one of the poorest countries in the world. In the decade prior to independence, three million Indians [wikipedia.org] starved to death.
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Statistical distortion much? In the 1600s there was no industrialization yet, so all Europeans were poor except for a tiny elite. By 1947 most Europeans had a reasonable level of income, even so soon after the bloodiest war in history. Meanwhile India suffered from centuries of religious war between the Hindu and the you-know-whos, and the man British excuse for staying was actually the knowledge that of they were to leave, the two factions would annihilate each other.
Once Britain hit on the idea of isolati
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It's called White Guilt. Google it.
Also, a corollary according to Jerry Pournelle: "Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide."
And he also describes his politics as "somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan". I guess if you see the non-Western Civilization as the enemy, then foreign aid is aiding and abetting them. Because total war justifies children dying of starvation, dirty water, lack of housing or basic healthcare. Except western civilization has been "helping the savages" for a long time, what's lacking is just the religious indoctrination of missionaries, I guess without the reward in followers it's not worth the compassion.
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Alas, WW2 doesn't seem to have been about religion, and it's still the largest war in human history (and if it were split into two separate wars, they'd be the two largest wars in history).
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Ah yes, the old Humpty Dumpty tactic.
Six million Jews (Score:2)
Alas, WW2 doesn't seem to have been about religion
Six million people killed for practicing Judaism, as well as members of the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses sent to the camps for their pacifism, would disagree with you.
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Don't tell a Jews that. The Nazis sold it as being part of an anti-Jewish anti-Communist crusade.
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Personally, I do favour a more hands-off approach. Let people figure out their own future, as (IMHO) it seems that western aid often brings with it a perpetual dependence on that aid.
On the other hand, from some of your previous posts I gather that you personally are an emigrant from China to a large western state. A lot of emigration from "poor countries" to western countries happens because people are not happy with the way those countries (the people in it) survive, they want to "survive" somewhat "bett
Re:Why giving ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Question: "Why then the West wants to give out money to help those "poor" countries?"
Answer: "China didn't receive any fucking foreign aid from nobody" "Tens of millions of people perished"
Question: "they never got any "Western aid" at all, and still, they survived, right?"
Answer: "Tens of millions of people perished"
Look, the survival of the country doesn't mean shit. Countries are just organizational tools. The aid has the objective of improving the lives of the people, not the country, and it does work - it has been rigorously demonstrated to work when it's done a certain way under certain conditions. All that the article is trying to do is point out that those conditions are very idiosyncratic and that aid organizations need to take that under consideration.
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US STILL sends aid to China to subsidize solar (Score:2)
> China didn't receive any fucking foreign aid from nobody
They actually received billions in foreign aid, cash from the US and subsidized loans from Japan. Aid to China has dropped dramatically over the last 30 years, but USAID is still sending taxpayer money to China to subsidize their green energy industry. At the same time, the US is suing China for illegal subsidies to their solar industry, which violate trade agreements.
So the current standard operating procedure in the US is:
Make a trade deal w
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With or without the "disruptive method", those "foreign aid" is a waste of money anyway...
Maybe you never have personally experienced the benefits and profitability of public relations.
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Re:For those who found TFA to be TLDR (Score:5, Informative)
He gives examples - a rigorous four-year study found that giving deworming pills to children in a particular area in Kenya had a larger impact on school attendance than giving them textbooks, even though they were very short on textbooks. A deworming program has subsequently been rolled out to cover millions of children in Africa and India, with a hope for similar results, but they've stopped with the rigorous testing with the feeling that they've sufficiently demonstrated the program's usefulness. The author points out several reasons why, for some areas, textbooks might still be a better answer and makes the claim that grand programs like this one can be both ineffective at their goals and have pretty crazy unforeseen consequences. There's a funny example of unforeseen consequences with a group of teenage latina girls who went through a workshop intended to keep them out of gangs, a successful workshop: not one of them was arrested for violence within six months of the end of the program. However, within those six months every one of them had become pregnant. Apparently gang membership was fulfilling a need for them that found they had to satisfy in some other way.
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Scientific replication and generalization requires multiple studies of competing hypotheses.
Or better, test your aid to make sure it's actually working. A technique could work in multiple studies of competing hypotheses and still not work later on.
But if you are spending millions of dollars without checking how well it's working, why not?
but you could turn it around the other way and say that fads involving big ideas are hurting science as well
I'm not sure that's relevant. Deworming kids isn't exactly a big idea.
It takes government to save every village (Score:2)
Ideas that work well ... oftentimes only apply to the specific area which was studied. ... charitable development needs to stop thinking big and start working incrementally, village by village
But wait! Homogenizing problems is what the government excels at! It's "too hard" to examine all of the individual situations*, and they'll all match up in the wash, so let's come up with a single, proven solution that solves things for everyone, everywhere, always. Any Unforeseen Consequences, if they exist, have a short Half-Life.
I really hadn't considered that NGOs had succumbed to this, I thought it was just something in the culture in D.C
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For you reading-impaired types, the points being made were: respect local culture, allow local entrepreneurship to flourish in possibly unexpected ways, and approach developing world societies as whole systems, rather than focusing in isolation on the funding and engineering of your playground pump.
But watch that first point, because sometimes you just have to stand up and demand that some aspect of local culture be changed if any progress is going to occur. If this author were to encounter a society that p
I don't blame people for trying alternatives (Score:2)
The only thing that foreign aid has helped accomplish so far (the last FORTY years!), is prop up dictators and help them balance their budgets, so as to keep their weapons-buying programs out of harms way. This article sounds like somebody has a cushy job to lose.
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Yeah. Especially in the U.S. "foreign aid" == military subsidies
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But what we discovered in the Middle East is that those dictators were all that was keeping religious psychos at bay. Now we're scrambling to groom a new generation of dictators to set the Middle East right again.
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And that's just considering the US (USAid, MIC subsidies funneled through Israel & Egypt, etc.).
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the problem is the decision makers - not the ideas
being in charge means *deciding between options*
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Re:Were Hunter-gatherers doing better (Score:4, Interesting)
No.
Says a guy typing on a computer that couldn't exist along with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
For the record, agriculture was the first development that freed up labor from the "hunter/gatherer" mode to allow enough surplus to develop things like, oh, computers (along with the rest of civilization).
And another one decribed that lifetyle as "nasty, brutish, and short".
Just curious, have you ever tried a "hunter/gatherer" lifestyle? Gone to a wilderness area, ditched the trappings of civilization (clothes, cellphone, computer, canteen, all that stuff), and tried living on what you could hunt down or gather (and no, I'm not referring to what you can gather at the local Mcdonald's...)...
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Just curious, have you ever tried a "hunter/gatherer" lifestyle? Gone to a wilderness area, ditched the trappings of civilization (clothes, cellphone, computer, canteen, all that stuff), and tried living on what you could hunt down or gather (and no, I'm not referring to what you can gather at the local Mcdonald's...)...
I said hunter-gatherer, not living all by myself. They had things called tribes and families, you know. See Dances with Wolves sometime.
And another one decribed that lifetyle as "nasty, brutish, and short".
Again, you seem to equate hunting/gathering with lawless anarchy where it's every man for himself. Ice Age hunters formed groups and undoubtedly worked well with each other.
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Feel free to take family and friends with you on your great experiment in living the hunter/gatherer lifestyle. If you can convince them that living in the woods scrounging for food is better than sitting in their comfortable house watching the interwebs....
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Um, no sir, he was not. That nasty, brutish and short was all at the hand of dear, kind Mother Nature herself. Animals fight back you know. Winter is brutish and unforgiving. Life is short because of those things and the fact that you had better not get injured or sick.
And, FYI, being a hunter/gatherer takes a helluva lot more space than an agrarian or our society
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See Dances with Wolves sometime.
That's it. I'll live on a movie set. The interns will bring anything I need...
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Please define "better". For myself, the greatest achievement of humankind is the advancement of knowledge about the world. Depending on what your priorities are, you could argue that a different era was "better" (e.g. less polution, less stress [doubtful], more "natural", or whatever floats your boat). But if you give up on what makes us what we are, you could argue that the best way to live your life is to be in a coma. Yes, today sucks but it is still better than any day before. YMMV.
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I'm not talking about *you* per se, I'm talking about poor people in Africa. A healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems preferable to dying from lack of clean water.
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What makes you think hunter/gatherers historically had access to clean water? What makes you think that water that the rest of the animal kingdom has been crapping and pissing in is "clean water"?
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Hunting and gathering works only for small human populations. That's why the one place where advanced western societies are still hunting and gathering, at sea, has led to a horrendous problem of fish depletion. For the good of the oceans we need to ban use of that stupid "Wild Caught" label on fish and get good at aquaculture.
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Because we have not been farming most species for very long, there have been a lot of early problems with fish farming. This should not deter us from getting better at it. If the ultra-green New Zealanders can do it, so can we.
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a noteworthy scholar had commented once that a hunter-gatherer from 100,000 BC lived better than the average man in 19th century London.
The average working man led a pretty horrible life in an industrialised 19th century city, so that is entirely possible.
However, the relevant comparison is with an average person in 21st century London. I know which lifestyle I'd prefer, and as a clue it's the one where I can walk into a supermarket and buy food for my kids.
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the problem is people (Score:2)
people got them into their current situation and people are keeping them there, it's that simple. it's a global problem, it's just worse in some areas.
What Works and What Doesn't (Score:3)
What works is the "tinkerer's blessing" (opposite of the curse of natural resources). Chronicled in Yuzo Takahashi's history of Japanese radio technicians https://muse.jhu.edu/login?aut... [jhu.edu] , development is best done through normal trade with geeks and technicians. South Korea, Singapore, Guangdong, Taiwan, etc. all developed from refurbishing and reverse engineering used technology. Benjamin Franklin was engaged in buying used surplus printing machines and textile machines for reassembly in the USA, Technicians, nerds, repairers, fixers tend to be smart quiet truthful people, and when economies grow from talented knock off (Shanzai in Chinese) to outsourced contracting to ODM, you wind up with Terry Gou, Simon Lin, and Lee Byung-chul.
What has tragically happened in Africa and India is that do gooders and celebrities like Annie Leonard have found a recipe of white guilt and created a bogus "e-waste" crisis which puts African geeks and nerds in prison. FreeHurricaneBenson. Forums like Slashdot, where repair and tinkerers gather, have been important places to assess the ewaste hoax. http://retroworks.blogspot.com... [blogspot.com] I lived in Africa in the mid 1980s and have been finding win-win trade with display devices for almost two decades, and see Africans getting increasingly furious at the people making up fake stats, taking pictures of kids at dumps, and making money without sharing. Search Heather Agyepong's "The Gaze on Agbogbloshie", or read Emmanuel Nyaletey's "My Reaction to The E-Waste Tragedy" http://www.isri.org/news-publi... [isri.org] Emmanuel is an electronics repair technician who grew up a few blocks from Agbogbloshie, Ghana, the scrapyard in a city of 4 million people (Ghana). currently on scholarship for coding at Georgia Tech. I'll put my money on geeks like Emmanuel and the free market over anti-trade rantists and celebrity AID show Bob Geldoffs all day long.
Prof. Yunus "Creating a World Without Poverty" (Score:5, Informative)
this is really really important: anyone wishing to make a difference in the world really REALLY needs to read the book written by Professor Yunus, the joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Price, "Creating a World Without Poverty".
in his book, Professor Yunus describes how he naively studied Economics because he believed that he would be able to change his country's financial situation through studying first world economies. after graduation he set out just after one of the worst natural disasters his country had experienced and realised how completely pointless his studies had been. however he did not give up, and set out to work out what the problem actually was.
he learned that the poor are first and foremost incredibly resourceful... mostly because they have to. he also learned that many of them are, because there are no enforceable usury laws, permanently kept in debt to money-lenders. this shocked him so badly that once he freed an entire village from debt just from the small change in his wallet: something like $USD 15 was all it took to pay off a decade of usury.
what he discovered is that the gratitude of these people when freed from their former situation is immeasurable. the Grameen Bank doesn't have lawyers or debt collectors. the people that they lend money to are so GRATEFUL that they work non-stop to turn their lives around and pay off their loan. in fact, the repayment success rate is around NINETY EIGHT percent. it's so high that the *GRAMEEN BANK* considers it to be THEIR FAULT if one of their customers is ever in default. by contrast in the western world the default rate is 88%. i'll repeat that again in case it's not clear: only TWELVE PERCENT of creditors in the western world pay their debts on time, every time, and in full.
but the main reason why anyone wishing to help the emerging markets and the third world should read his book is because he patiently, with all the knowledge from his economics background, outlines why NGOs, Charity and the "Corporate Social Responsibility" clauses of standard profit-maximising Capitalist Corporations are all worse than doomed but are guaranteed to be ineffective at best and invariably seriously damaging and counter-productive.
right at the start of his book he outlines a surprising offer by Danone to work with him (follow his advice) to actually be effective. it was Professor Yunus's first experience of having been "under the microscope" of people with both big resources and heart. in other words the team at Danone were huge fans of what Yunus was trying to achieve: when he explained to them the financial structure that was needed, they listened, and they did it. they did not go in with a charity, or with donations: they set up a "non-loss, non-dividend" business, selling *locally-produced* yoghurt that happened to have the nutritients that the local population happened (by a not-coincidence) to be chronically deficient in.
the yohurt was sold not at a loss but at an affordable financially sustainable price because the focus was on remaining *stable*, not on exploitation through maximisation of profits: the focus was on allowing people to feel proud of what they achieved, and to take responsibility for their own wealth. they were EMPOWERED through the enormous generous resources of Danone's, but it was a successful venture because they LISTENED to what Professor Yunus had to say.
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Disruptive
How in the world do we come to the idea that just because something is disruptive it is a good thing? In most cases, I would argue the opposite.
"Disruptive" is the buzzword du jour for all the libertarian fruitbats who read Dystopian novels as aspirational lifestyle guides.
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this shocked him so badly that once he freed an entire village from debt just from the small change in his wallet: something like $USD 15 was all it took to pay off a decade of usury.
How long did it take before they were back in debt?
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I think the point is not that they *want* to go back into debt - most people in poverty know that debt is bad, and that they really shouldn't be borrowing money they can't pay back. (This goes for people in the West in addition to people elsewhere.)
The problem is that if you don't have a sufficient "resource cushion" it's incredibly easy to get back on a debt treadmill. All it takes is a sick kid, or a broken car, or some other emergency where you *need* money now, and all of a sudden you're spending most o
**bad idea** not "big idea" (Score:2)
we have to blame the business people here
the problem is that the people with money don't know the difference between a *good* tech innovation and *bullshit* marketing gussied up as tech innovation
the problem is ignorance of the decision makers, not our ideas
there are plenty of good ideas to be had floating in the ether...
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Anything like that, IIRC, is administered by the GSA.
big ideas also hurt national development (Score:2)
People are always looking for quick fixes and silver bullets, preferably centrally administered and implemented in a few years. They don't work for international development, but they also don't work in national politics.
The best way of achieving prosperity and development is to ensure that people are free to make their own choices, not to dump government aid or programs on them.
Who defines "game changing"? (Score:2)
Because a "big idea" that fails to provide widespread beneficial results is, by definition, not game changing*. It sounds like your PR people just got a bit ahead of themselves while trying to raise venture capital.
*On the other hand, a few people trying to lash together a couple of DEC PDPs with no grandiose thoughts of being game changing seem to have done just that.
Thanks for the post (Score:1)